Some quick thoughts on _Young Adult_
Spoiler warning for those who haven’t seen it yet.
I was surprised how much Young Adult affected me. As I was watching it, it didn’t strike me as so hot, but it packed an emotional punch that stuck with me long after it ended. I think, like Elephant, it’s a film that sort of intentionally bad.
Alyssa sees something deep in Diablo Cody’s new film Young Adult, but I think she misses something deeper: the film is a critique of traditional romantic narratives (the protagonist is an author of them; she assumes life is like The Graduate; she spends half the movie literally transmuting her life into a novel).
Where traditional romances start with a protagonist who’s missing something in their life, Mavis is missing pretty much everything. Where others go off on an adventure in search of someone who fits them, Mavis retreats into her past for someone who does not fit at all.
And the world she inhabits points out the absurdity of such things. Where a film normally obsesses on its protagonists, everyone in Young Adult thinks the protagonist’s obsessions are a form of mental illness. And where normally such films end happily once the protagonist gets what they want, Mavis not only doesn’t get it, but comes to conclude that her whole life (and the life of everyone around her) is absolutely meaningless — so much so that it doesn’t even make a difference whether any of them live or die.
The film deconstructs the entire genre so throughly that there’s basically nothing left by the end of it. And it closes, after deconstructing it all, by letting us start our lives anew, unconstrained by cinematic formulas.
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